The present disclosure relates to a system and a method for detecting concealed cargo and/or concealed passengers in a vehicle.
Detection of concealed passengers or concealed cargo in a vehicle can be difficult without inspecting its interior space and/or compartments. One of the primary challenges in detecting concealed passengers or concealed cargo in a vehicle is the relative abundance of compartments available in a vehicle in which a passenger or cargo can be hidden.
Numerous methods exist for screening the vehicle for concealed passengers or concealed cargo.
A full manual inspection (e.g., by guards or border patrol personnel) of the vehicle is the most obvious, and generally extremely effective method for detecting concealed cargo and/or concealed passengers in a vehicle. However, such manual inspection is often time consuming. When such manual inspection is conducted at high traffic points of entry, such as border crossings, checkpoints, and tunnels, the guards or border patrol personnel have a minimal time available to conduct the search, without severely impacting traffic throughput. Further, such inspection is not completely foolproof.
Vehicles may be screened by interrogating the driver of the vehicle at a checkpoint, determining if an additional search is required based on the interrogation, and routing the vehicle to a secondary search area to perform additional searching to detect concealed cargo and/or concealed passengers in a vehicle. This type of screening may be generally referred to as primary/secondary search method.
High technology systems may be also used to perform vehicle screening, but are generally extremely expensive with very low throughput. One example of such a high technology system is a system built by SAIC called VACIS. The VACIS system includes a gamma-ray imager system in which suspicious vehicles are run through a special screening lane. However, such system is extremely expensive (i.e., 1 M+/unit) and requires between 30 and 60 seconds to conduct a check, thus, impacting traffic throughput.
The present disclosure provides improvements over the prior art vehicle screening methods and systems for detecting concealed cargo and/or concealed passengers in a vehicle.